Found 21 article(s) for author 'Economic Policy'

Understanding and Overcoming Roadblocks to Environmental Sustainablity. Past Roads and Future Prospects. Shawn Cole, January 15, 2019, Paper, “This working paper examines key barriers to business sustainability discussed at a multidisciplinary conference held at the Harvard Business School in 2018. Drawing on perspectives from both the historical and business literatures, speakers debated the historical success and future opportunities for voluntary business actions to advance sustainability. Roadblocks include misaligned incentives, missing institutions, inertia of economic systems, and the concept of sustainability itself. It appears that overcoming these roadblocks will require systematic interventions and alternative normative concepts.” Link

Risks to the Global Economy in 2019. Kenneth Rogoff, January 11, 2019, Opinion, “Over the course of this year and next, the biggest economic risks will emerge in those areas where investors think recent patterns are unlikely to change. They will include a growth recession in China, a rise in global long-term real interest rates, and a crescendo of populist economic policies.” Link

Famed Harvard economist warns of Brexit spillover from clash. Martin Feldstein, November 15, 2018, Video, “The resignations of some members of British Prime Minister Theresa May’s government Opens a New Window. and calls Thursday for a no-confidence vote over a proposed Brexit deal hammered the British pound and European stock markets.” Link

The Crisis Next Time: What We Should Have Learned From 2008. Carmen Reinhart, November/December 2018, Paper, “At the turn of this century, most economists in the developed world believed that major economic disasters were a thing of the past, or at least relegated to volatile emerging markets. Financial systems in rich countries, the thinking went, were too sophisticated to simply collapse. Markets were capable of regulating themselves. Policymakers had tamed the business cycle. Recessions would remain short, shallow, and rare.” Link

This might be the most short-sighted set of economic policies since World War II. Lawrence Summers, October 11, 2018, Video, “Larry Summers, former Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and Harvard University president emeritus, joins ‘Squawk on the Street’ to discuss the White House’s Larry Kudlow’s comments on the U.S. economy.” Link

Challenges Ahead. Ricardo Hausmann, 2018, Book Chapter, “Sovereign debt ratios in advanced and emerging economies have grown to near record highs, while in low-income countries, debt levels have been gradually building since the debt relief of the early 2000s. As global monetary conditions tighten, the burden of debt will grow, and rollover risks will increase. And with a more fragmented creditor base, timely and orderly restructurings may become harder to achieve. This chapter will explore these challenges and consider which policies might enhance crisis prevention and strengthen crisis resolution. It will also consider the extent to which these objectives can be pursued by individual countries, and where multilateral action may be required to improve the international architecture.” Link

Trump’s Currency Confusion Continues. Jeffrey Frankel, September 20, 2018, Opinion, “Ever since the 2016 US presidential campaign, Donald Trump has falsely accused the Chinese of keeping the renminbi artificially weak. But the fact is that Trump’s own economic policies are driving up the value of dollar – an outcome that would have been foreseen by anyone with a basic understanding of economics.” Link

Interview with Harvard Professor Robert Barro. Robert Barro, September 1, 2018, Opinion, “Robert Barro is a highly influential economist and has written extensively about macroeconomics. He is the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University, a senior fellow at Stanford University and co-editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economic. Barro shares a free market view of the current economic climate during an in-depth conversation with Filthy Lucre.” Link

Place-specific Determinants of Income Gaps: New Sub-National Evidence from Chiapas, Mexico. Ricardo Hausmann, 2018, Paper, “The literature on income gaps between Chiapas and the rest of Mexico revolves around individual factors, such as education and ethnicity. Yet, twenty years after the Zapatista rebellion, the schooling gap between Chiapas and the other Mexican entities has shrunk while the income gap has widened, and we find no evidence indicating that Chiapas indigenes are worse-off than their likes elsewhere in Mexico. We explore a different hypothesis. Based on census data, we calculate the economic complexity index, a measure of the knowledge agglomeration embedded in the economic activities at a municipal level in Mexico. Economic complexity explains a larger fraction of the income gap than any individual factor. Our results suggest that chiapanecos are not the problem, the problem is Chiapas. These results hold when we extend our analysis to Mexico’s thirty-one federal entities, suggesting that place-specific determinants that have been overlooked in both the literature and policy, have a key role in the determination of income gaps.” Link

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